


Adaptation

by neifile7



Series: Landfall [2]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Backstory, Fractured Evolutionary Theory, Implied kink, Jack is not politically correct, Multi, POV Second Person, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-30 00:29:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neifile7/pseuds/neifile7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harkness Anthropology 101: An Abridged Guide to Human Sexual Evolution. Set early in S1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adaptation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amand_r](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/gifts).



> Evolution is often invoked when people try to explain human sexual behavior. It can be as slippery an authority as the Bible. Here’s a look at some thoughts that Jack might have had on the matter after a century and more on Earth.
> 
> Beta by 51stCenturyFox and andreth47. First published on LJ on 05/05/09.

**I. The Raw and the Cooked**

 

It’s not exactly a news flash that you consider sex the greatest wonder in the universe.

 

But really, no one understands that it’s not just a joke.

 

You’d call yourself well-informed, after all.  First-hand experience, of course, of human- and alien-kind in all their varied glory, but also a dedicated study of sex in human history. 

 

You may be a poor boy from Boeshane, but in sex terms, you were born to privilege. Killer looks, even for your genetically blessed homeworld.  Inborn immunity to almost all known STDs.  An enlightened division of labor on key matters like childbearing.  Strong, diverse families and whole planets where sex was a moveable feast, always room for one more at table.

 

Without those evolutionary advantages, how could humans ever have colonized the whole galaxy? 

 

Maybe it’s made you a touch arrogant.  Maybe you’re like any other colonial, always thinking that you’re bringing the gospel with you, part of humanity’s vanguard.  Maybe you take it just a little too much for granted that you’ll always be the hottest, yummiest, most bad-ass dish on the menu.   But you’ve had a couple of lifetimes to sex your way in and out of trouble, and that’s got to count for something.

 

Bad luck, then, that you’re beached in linear time on a planet that has so many downright weird ideas about sex.  Sure, things are looser these days  (a few of the recent decades are best forgotten), but you wonder, sometimes, how these early humans can get their heads around so many contradictions.  The worst part is that most people really, really believe that their attitudes are “natural” somehow, as if sex hasn’t been evolving and changing human culture since before the days of mud huts.  Like dietary practices, really.

 

So while finding partners isn’t a problem, compatibility’s usually off the menu.  You put years into cultivating your palate, and now you’re getting by on the equivalent of takeaway and fast food.  Given a choice, you’d prefer to have at least one steady fuck at any given time, because yeah, these days novelty for its own sake gets old fast (and you’d rather not remember just how much novelty you may have to look forward to). 

 

And the best sex, like the best food, is all about the basic materials, and working up the patience and skill to experiment with them.

 

It just seems to take most of your partners a damn long time to get there.  You’ve had to reinvent the wheel way too often over the simplest things (like the mind-blowing capabilities of feet, for example).  Your liking for a hint of spice, for offbeat ingredients – well, it’s not exactly like ordering a pizza, and humans have always tended to be a bit touchy about their condiments.

 

However, you’re nothing if not adaptable.  You pride yourself, really, on being an evolutionary credit to the species. 

 

You just make a point of watching out for the unexpected.

 

 

 

**II. The Lexicon: a Historical Atlas of Verbal Abuse**

It’s as if they all speak some archaic dialect of your birth-tongue.  Key terms lost in translation, idiom a bit shaky.  Vocabulary’s not enough, either: when it comes to sex on this planet, context is everything.

 

You’ve embraced the challenge with enthusiasm.  Once you get someone into bed, you let your body do most (well, at least some) of the talking, and you pride yourself on listening really, really well.  But it doesn’t always prevent the wires from crossing.  

 

You love a drawn-out, chatty afterglow, for example, with a few extra rounds of action; but anyone after a good hard fuck won’t go for what looks like intimacy, while those who think you might be boyfriend material see it as a declaration of intent.  And neither will understand why you think it’s the  _perfect_  moment for delving into past exploits.

 

Most partners – even those who don’t insist on exclusivity-- also take a dim view of how you automatically check out every new acquaintance (because  _why not_ ).

 

You figure it’s mostly okay that you’re not word-perfect.  Gives you a touch of exotic allure, maybe, and it’s not as though you’re trying to pass as native.  It’s a lot like your literal speech, the way your basic American now has enough British to hover mid-Atlantic.  On the other hand, you’re surrounded by an insular bunch, suspicious of anyone without the regional accent, and maybe even more of obvious hybrids like yourself.  And since that goes double for the bed-dialect, well, better keep up your conversational practice.  Oh yes.

 

But just when you think you’re finally becoming fluent, the syntax changes on you.

 

Ever since you landed back on Earth, you’ve kept a yellowing sheet of foolscap tucked into your inner coat pocket.  It’s a list of every sexual insult and label you’ve been tagged with in a hundred and forty years.  You figure it’s as good a way as any of learning what spooks people: a kind of atlas of invective, a road-map of the changing borders of deviance.  Might be useful to future sexicographers, too, but for now it simply puts things in perspective:

 

Immoral

Immodest

Degenerate

Cad

Bugger

Invert

Pervert

Polymorphously perverse

Promiscuous

Peckerwood

Ponce

Pansy

Poofter (what is it with the Ps, anyway?)

Fairy

Faggot

Fudgepacker

Gigolo

Bent

Bumboy

Uphill gardener

Exhibitionist

Indiscriminate (that one hurts)

Shallow

Sex-crazed

Slut

Shirtlifter

Shitheel

Shit-stabber (a good run of Ss in the postwar period)

Arsebandit

Narcissist

Knob

Tool

Tosser

Twat

Wanker

And your most recent entries:

Fuckwit

Manwhore

 

You have to shake your head, sometimes.  Such a waste of good shagging energy, and it’s not as though it  _changes_  anything.  It must work on some people, though, swallowing up their desires and gagging them with fear.  Shame, that.  Swallowing and gagging have far pleasanter uses, in the right time and place.

 

You don’t bother writing down the epithets you’d actually  _like_  to hear.  They change too much over time and depend more on specific voices and moments.  But you never get tired of some of them: your (assumed) name, of course, interspersed with demands for  _more_  and _there_ ;  _fill me, take me, take it deeper, open for me, that’s perfect, you’re gorgeous, you sexy beast._  And you don’t forget the gasps, the groans, the growls and howls that need no translation at all.

 

But damn, you’d like to record every one of them someday, and try to figure out what you’ve missed.

 

**III. Biomorphic Behavioral Factors; or, Pissing on Your Leg**

 

Male mammals of terrestrial origin have dicks.  Dicks have two immediate functions: inseminating and pissing.  All wrapped up in one elegant biomorphic package.

 

Even in this century, they know it’s not quite that simple.

 

But geez, the crap they talk about it.  Lord knows you’re fond of your own dick and what you can do with it, but you know well that all the pseudo-evolutionary talk about marking territory and alphas and pack order is just so much bullshit.

 

Humans aren’t dogs, or wolves.  Humans are apes.  Apes fool around with rank and gender and each other – they compete, make babies, have  _fun_.  Apes play with themselves (bonobos even have clits).  Maybe apes piss on each other, but you’d bet it’s more golden showers than claiming ownership.

 

Here’s what you think about your apehood, as it affects your manhood:

 

You’ve foraged solo when you had to, but you’ve happily fallen back into makeshift families, ragbag tribes of hunters, soldiers, traveling rogues.  You’ve fucked many of them and loved not a few, but that’s beside the point.  When you had them, you needed them – they were _your people_ , and you’d defend them and lay your life down for them if that were at issue.

 

Sex and power – well, yes, but for chrissakes, it’s power shared, divided then multiplied.  (And you’d definitely wish the “wanker” label on anyone who doesn’t get it.) You know that there is something primal about putting your dick in someone else, but that taking one is just as intense a form of connection.  And neither has a damn thing to do with who’s calling the shots.

 

So.  Cock-measuring contests?  Bring ‘em on.  Got a problem that needs a good shot of testosterone?  You’re the go-to guy.  But group survival, adaptation – those mean that in the field or in bed, you’ve got to know when to  _let it all go_.

 

There’s a reason you’ve clung to the rank of Captain.  Just enough authority.  Not too much.

 

What it adds up to is that you do understand something about possessiveness.  About status and belonging.  But you doubt any of it’s to be had at either end of a cock.  Or what comes out of it.

 

That goes double since…since the Game Station. Sex looks a lot like your life these days. You can have something for an hour, a night, maybe a year or two, and then it’s gone.  Even if you believed in it, it would be stupid to think that staking claims means all that much.

 

Better to stick to first lessons, then. 

 

Manners have never been your strong point, but even you learned in kindergarten (or its 51st-century equivalent) not to piss in the sandbox, and to share your toys.

**IV. Proximity effects: or, Conduct unbecoming an officer**

 

Okay, this workplace harassment thing.  Big can of worms, even if you understand it in theory.

 

They’re all pretty confused about gender, anyway, and it’s going to take another millennium for any major rewrites on the sex/power equation.  In the meantime, people can get hurt, discipline can go to hell, so, okay, maybe some rules are in order. 

 

Of course, you’ve used sex as a bargaining chip yourself, in past lines of work; those pheromones were all that got you in or out of tight spots, half the time. But conning or coercing someone to get laid?  You’re kidding, right?  It’s not just that you’re Jack Harkness and don’t  _need_  to; you can’t imagine anyone actually  _wanting_  to.   Doesn’t that sort of take all the fun out of it?

 

You’ll admit that these guidelines for workplace conduct fascinate you, in an anthropological way.  They’re tied up with the awkward charm of sex in this time and place, all the little assumptions these people hold about “natural” and “correct” behavior for men and women.  Even in the time you’ve been around here –  just a blink on the evolutionary scale -- those have undergone more sea changes than you can count.

 

What it all means is that there’s a damn big challenge putting theory into practice.  It matters, now, because you’re the boss, and you have to set an example and enforce the rules, and all that.  And with someone like Owen on staff, the issue’s going to come up sooner or later.

 

You wonder what the team would say if you just sat down and spelled it out for them: (a) right into your thirties, you routinely slept with most of your co-workers, fellow-travelers, comrades-in-arms.  (b) Orgies were regular if informal team-building exercises that kept everyone relaxed and watching each others’ backs when it counted.  (c) Having a primary partner was great, but exclusivity was a luxury that people working in close quarters usually couldn’t afford. (d) You could always say no, but hardly anyone ever did.  (e) Sex and common cause were virtually interchangeable and nobody made too much of a fuss about it.

 

You know that you can’t count on any such trade-off here and now, and even if you explain it in words of one syllable, they won’t understand.  It’s that language barrier again, but something else, too.  You’re treating their loyalty like the precious and fragile currency that it is.  You’re saving it for that rainy day that you  _know_  is coming (and that they, poor sods, can’t know about yet), and in the meantime, you’ll have unpopular decisions to make. 

 

And you’re smart enough to know that sex isn’t going to buy their investment half as effectively as mystery will.   Always with a dash of charisma, though: you’ll settle for flirting, innuendo, a little extra touching, and your endless stock of stories.

 

But of course, you still think about fucking every one of them, in vivid and loving detail.

\---------

 

Suzie, now.  She’d all but jumped your bones about a month into her tenure, just stripped off and slid into your cot one night, no preliminaries.  Made you downright nostalgic.  Nice, too, to be on the receiving end of all that admirable focus and intensity, but she didn’t let go, not really. Happy enough to rack up the orgasm count but much too impatient to linger in the afterglow. You thought, afterwards, that maybe she was redressing a balance of some sort, and you hadn’t been quite what she expected.  When she moved on to Owen, it just confirmed your suspicion that power trumped pleasure for her, every time.

 

Owen likes to think that he’s straight but adventurous.  He’s a classic case of a man who likes to fuck dirty, with really rather childish notions of shock value.  He can’t quite hide his prurient interest in your sex life, and in turn you find him strangely attractive and naïve.  You’d like to show him what he’s been missing, give him a blowjob that would send him clean out of his mind, for example (it’s pathetically clear that he’s never had a really decent suck in his life).   But Owen’s a teetery sort of bastard at the best of times, and it’s better not to mess too much with his balance; and his default, if Suzie was anything to go by, is to shag in anger.  Time and a place for that, and it’s not your own front porch.

 

Oh, but you’d really like to sleep with Toshiko at least once.  She has no idea how lovely she truly is, and you’d like to make her feel that, impart a little more confidence, maybe.  You can hardly look at her sometimes without imagining how your hands would fit around her ribcage and ass, just so, and how you’d breathe in that ghost-scent of incense clinging to her skin.  Never gonna happen, though, not with your shared history.  And then, just look at how she reacts to Owen.  This is, above all, a woman who fixes things as she goes along, who can improvise impossible patches in the most broken bits of tech, and she hasn’t yet learned how poorly that works with people. One whiff of your own damage, and she’d break her heart by failing to put it right.

 

You fell hard for Gwen on her first day.  She’s so grounded yet innocent (ah, Rose), so resilient, so  _unbroken_  compared to the rest.  You’ve always been a goner for not-quite-conventional women with a swing in their hips and a pout to their lips.  Of course you’ve been manipulating your mutual attraction from the start – what faster route to her interest and trust?  And you don’t have to meet Rhys to know he’s the other half of the equation; Gwen will flirt with you and all your dangers because she feels safe and protected.  So you’ve got to make sure she doesn’t have to choose.  You’ve got to do what it takes to keep her, and push her to hang onto him.  No harm in fantasizing, though, that he’s a red-hot Welshman with a generous streak in bed and a couple of voyeuristic kinks of his own.

 

And speaking of hot Welshmen: there’s a reason you’ve left Ianto to the end of your to-do-or-not-to-do list. 

**V. Natural predators; or, camouflage**

 

Ianto had picked up plenty of Torchwood One gossip, no doubt, and those first crude approaches confirmed every bit of your contempt for the Institute and all its belongings.  You’ve never made a hire on shaggability alone (much as you like pretty faces about you), and as far as you were concerned, he could take his Trojan Horse act elsewhere.

 

But then Ianto surprised you.  He’d shed the boy-bait trappings for more suitable attire, ha ha, and shown himself, after a little initial snark at Cardiff’s expense, every bit as good at improvising as you were.  And admit it, you’re a sucker for anyone who studies you, tries to figure out what you’ll go for.  In bed or out of it.

 

And he hadn’t pressed his advantage once he had you under him on that warehouse floor. That had been…damn, but also, wow.  Self-control, apparently, also on the list of virtues.

 

But you’d have sworn a different man had shown up for work the next day, barely recognizable except for the equally suave suit and how gorgeously he’d filled it.

 

Those hints of passion and desperation that hooked you as much as they raised your hackles: gone.  Speech and body language of an equal, complete with shoulder-grabbing: gone.  Instead, it’s “sir,” a well-schooled hovering at arm’s length as he passes you papers and coffee, discreetly accepts weapons and bits of tech.  Never touches you, except to help with the coat.  From the way he anticipates your every need, does all of Tosh’s and Suzie’s scutwork, and cleans up after every Owen disaster, you’d say he’s taken the “butler” business at face value.  And damn, that coffee.  Nectar.  You feel a little more godlike with each cup.

 

And then there’s the vanishing act, which he does so well you don’t even notice until he’s popped up at your elbow again.  He’s down the rabbit hole in the Archives, he’s in the Tourist Centre, he’s gliding about the Hub like a goddamn ghost.  He’s always around and he’s always occupied and it’s like he’s wearing a perception filter.  But not quite, and this is what really gets to you. 

 

Once in awhile, you get a glimpse of the man who stalked you: a flash of sarcasm, a neat deflection of your innuendo, something that declares that both of you are playing at fancy dress.  All those submerged  _possibilities_  break the surface, just for a moment, and then dive back out of sight.   And then you know.  The deference means nothing.  And it’s all you can do to stop yourself twisting your hands into tie and hair, twisting the buttons off that waistcoat, twisting that “sir” into the filthiest endearment imaginable. 

 

You wonder if you’re being seduced.  It’s strange as hell not to know.  If yes, it’s the longest, subtlest play you’ve encountered in decades, and damn if that doesn’t confirm that this one’s a keeper.

 

If not – well, it’s a good thing all told that Gwen came along when she did, because you might be breaking every rule in the handbook about buying allegiance with sex.

 

And at this point, you realize you’ve been thinking about shagging Ianto at least twice as long as any of the others.  Which means you’d probably better think twice as long again.

 

 

**VI. Random variables: the L-factor**

 

Evolution is no more a linear event than time itself.  Billions of random factors act upon inheritance, change what constitutes “fitness” and adaptation at any moment.

 

This insight circles randomly through your head as you rip apart a cyber-conversion unit and plot the mop-up of bodies, bloodstains and team dynamics.  You’re not thinking much about Ianto, really.  You’re mulling over the difference between killing machines and humans, and all the obsessions that lead to stupid and desperate acts.

 

You’re remembering, through the taste of bile and regret, the x-factor that has served as a constant in your own evolution.

 

More than sex, more than food, more than love itself, it’s been your addiction, your preferred stock-in-trade, your compulsion. You’ve given it freely, sought it greedily, and time and again, it’s reared back and bitten you in the ass.

 

It nearly destroyed you the day you dropped Gray’s hand, the day you watched your best friend tortured to death.

 

It turned sour during a five-year time loop, when a bored, frustrated partner found petty ways to betray you daily (and capped each casual transgression with dirty sex and mumbled, drunken love-talk).

 

You invested it, fruitlessly, in a series of commanding officers who presided over bloody disasters, in far too many parts of the galaxy – ending with Alex, driven to despair by a vision of a future beyond human tolerance.

 

You gave it, wholeheartedly, to a magical ship and two travelers who saved you in every possible way, only to abandon you just as thoroughly.

 

Don’t even think about Suzie.

 

Of all the defiance hurled at you tonight, one phrase echoes dully in your skull, like the drumbeat of a march you’ve followed all your life.

 

_Loyalty._

_Loyalty._

_My loyalty is to her._

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Claude Lévi-Strauss’ _The Raw and the Cooked (Le cru et le cuit,_ 1964), one of the core texts of structural anthropology, influenced several generations of thought on nature and culture. It has also been invoked to explain mythological aspects of language, male sexuality, and narrative. I have borrowed liberally (and doubtless inaccurately) from such works to imagine what evolution would look like to a 51st-century time traveller.


End file.
